Two free programs you'll find useful

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Chief Editor Ted Como brings you the latest tech advice on Tech Bytes

Published Monday, October 5 2009 - (2) Comments

As Scrooge said to Bob Cratchit, "Before you dot another 'I,' " grab two great software programs released last week that won't cost you a penny. One is Microsoft's security suite which will replace security software you have to pay to renew annually; the other is Picasa 3.5 which does amazing things with your photo collection.
I wrote about Microsoft Security Essentials last Sunday - it's a basic antivirus system that will protect your XP or Vista system and next month, the W7 operating system. You can get it at www.microsoft.com/Security(underline symbol)essentials.
Before you install it, remove any security software you currently use through Add or Remove programs on XP's Control Panel, or Programs and Features on Vista's; this will require a reboot. When Security Essentials opens for the first time it automatically downloads the latest virus definitions and is defaulted to begin an immediate scan. Click the Settings tab to change the default weekly scan which is set for 2 a.m. Sundays. Otherwise, the program will automatically update itself daily and yes, it does do real-time protection against infected e-mail. The other thing it does well is leave you alone.
SE runs quietly in background and doesn't interrupt you with messages. I removed McAfee from a Vista system last Wednesday and replaced it with SE - no more alerts about my subscription expiring soon; no more forcing me to open McAfee to see the results of a scan. If SE finds a problem, you don't get a message; you see an icon that's always present in your task bar turn from green to red - you may or may not click it to see what problem SE found, and fixed.
As to the latest release of Picasa, if you keep digital pictures on your computer you'll find this free program a godsend. It's available at http://picasa.google.com.
Even if Picasa didn't offer an incredible new feature which uses built-in facial recognition software to allow you to consolidate every individual in every picture you have on your computer into a personalized folder for that person, the tools it offers makes it essential to organizing your digital photo collection.
I have 15 years worth of digitized family pictures on one system, plus a collection of thousands of historic images of my hometown available at www.ogdensburg.info. The photos are scattered across dozens of folders, some named by date, some by event. To find all of the pictures in that collection of a single inidividual would be incredibly time consuming. But no more.
I was amazed at how rapidly Picasa scanned the images - less than an hour to examine each of thousands of photo and create a thumbnail image of every face in every one of them. Picasa then presented me with more than 15,000 "unnamed" individuals found in all those pictures, and grouped into several dozen thumbnails at a time. Pick one and name that person, and Picasa creates a folder for that individual and moves into it thumbnails from every picture where it recognizes the person. It won't get them all on the first past because poses are different, or you may have pictures of an individual taken over time where features have changed. But every time you find another instance of that individual and quickly add it to your named individual collection, Picasa looks for similar photos.
What you end up with is an alphabetical list of individualized collections of all of the people in your pictures - every instance of Aunt Martha will be represented in the Aunt Martha folder. Again, these are merely thumbnail links created by Picasa - it does not move any images from any folder on your system.
But Picassa does so much more: you may geotag your photos using Google maps by clicking the Places button in Picasa and dragging your photos to the location where you took them. You can import, upload and share your images to Picasa Web Albums. You can tag your pictures, rename them, export them, import directly from your camera, e-mail them, print them, consolidate them into albums, or do basic photo editing on them including removing redeye and adjusting color, contrast, fill light - even retouching. You may build a photo collage of your imates, or create a movie that plays fullscreen on your desktop.
As readers of this column know, I like free, and Gimp (gimp.org) is the open-source equivalent of Photoshop, now in version 2.7.0, which runs on any platform and makes a great companion software to Picasa in allowing you to do anything you can imagine to a photo. It has an easier learning curve than Photoshop and every feature you'll need. Similarly, Open Office (openoffice.org) provides the equivalent tools to Microsoft Office including a spreadsheet, word processor, presentation and graphics software and more.
Available at blender.org, Blender is billed as a content creation suite to do high-end 3D modeling. But if drawing is your thing, grab Inkscape (inkscape.org) and you'll have graphics capabilities similar to Illustrator or CorelDraw.
Stellarium: Also available free at Stellarium.org, is a planetarium for your computer which shows a realistic night sky in 3D from whatever coordinates you set, featuring hundreds of thousands of stars, illustration of the contellations, the Milky Way and planets in our solar system, and zoom and timing controls.
Fine Tune IE8: Visit http://tiny.cc/KRxwD for a great Computerworld piece on getting the most from Internet Explorer 8, including how to manage security settings, add-ons, Accelerators, and Web Slices. The article explains how these features works, and illustrates how to use them.

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Very informative, thanks!

citigreg . | 10/8/2009 - 1:14 PM - ( Comment

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Very informative, thanks!

citigreg . | 10/8/2009 - 1:14 PM - ( Comment

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